1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to agricultural trailers towed behind crop harvesters to receive and carry the harvested crops. More particularly, this invention relates to a nut harvest trailer having an improved stick and debris removing structure positioned above the hopper of the trailer, and an improved load distributing structure within the hopper.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Harvest trailers of one structure or another have been towed behind nut harvesters to receive and transport the harvested nuts for many years now. Nut harvesters pick up nuts which are usually in windrows on the ground in orchards. These nuts may be almonds, walnuts, pistachios and the like. The nuts are first knocked from the trees using powerful tree shaking machines. During the shaking process, many small tree limbs are knocked to the ground along with the nuts. The next step in the process is to have a crew of workers walk through the orchard and pick up the majority of the sticks and remove them from the orchard. After the sticks have been removed, the nuts are then swept into windrows using sweeping machines. The manual removal of the sticks from the orchard is labor intensive and therefor costly, and the more thorough the workers must be, the more costly the process.
Most nut harvesters and sweepers have little problem dealing with small sticks, although it appears as though larger branches will always need to be manually picked up and removed from the orchard. Small sticks which are overlooked by the stick removal crew usually are picked up by the nut harvester with the nuts, and deposited into the harvester trailer. This mixture of nuts and sticks, being by far mostly nuts, is then transported to a nut drying and processing plant where the mixture is deposited into additional nut processing equipment. The sticks are difficult at best to remove from the nuts with the equipment of most nut processing facilities. The sticks become dry and brittle, begin to break into smaller pieces during processing, clog up the processing machines, and are difficult to remove from the nuts to a degree to allow the nuts to be packaged for sale.
In more recent years, some harvest trailers have been equipped with rotating stick removal screens affixed over the top of the hopper of the trailer. These rotating screens are sized to cover the area where the nuts fall from the off load elevator of the nut harvester into the harvest trailer. The screen extends from the front of the trailer to the rear thereof. The openings of the screen are sized sufficiently large to allow nuts to fall through the screen and into the front of the trailer hopper. The openings of the screen are further sized to be sufficiently small enough to maintain most sticks on the top layer of the screen. This is possible largely in part due to the length of the sticks and the fact that the sticks generally land, or in up laying horizontally disposed on the top layer of the screen due to vibration and settling on the moving screen. The rotating screen carries the sticks from the front of the trailer where they are received from the off load elevator of the nut harvester, to the rear of the trailer where they are dumped off the back end and onto the ground behind the harvest trailer.
The dispensing of the nuts from the nut harvester is into the front of the harvest trailer under tow. This single location dumping into the hopper makes for an uneven distribution of the nuts in the trailer, which would lead to having to empty the trailer prior to it being completely full if it were not for the use of some kind of structuring to more evenly distribute the nuts in the trailer hopper. The nuts fall through the rotating screen almost exclusively at the point where they are deposited.
Past art harvest trailers with stick removal screens are normally equipped with two generally horizontally disposed screw augers in the bottom of the hopper to move the nuts from the front of the trailer hopper to the back thereof to distribute the load more evenly. The screw augers are normally powered by hydraulic motors which in turn are powered by the hydraulic pumping station common on modern nut harvesters and tractors. The hydraulic motors used to drive the screw augers consume power, leading to greater fuel consumption by the nut harvester. These load distributing screw augers rotate continuously while the harvest trailer is being loaded in the orchard, and it is not long into the loading process before the screw augers are completely covered with nuts. Rotating screw augers covered with nuts have a tendency to break and otherwise damage the crop, which is one problem addressed by my invention.
It should also be noted that harvest trailers are generally always equipped with a structure which allows removal of the nuts from the hopper of the trailer. Three types of nut unloading structures are currently in wide use in nut harvest trailers. The first type of hopper unload structure commonly in use are openable doors on the bottom of the hopper as included as a part of my bulk harvest trailer with power assist, disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,844,683 issued July 4, 1989. The openable doors on the bottom of the trailer hopper allow dumping the nuts into a recessed pit at a processing plant. The second type of common hopper unload structure is that of a horizontally disposed conveyor belt in the bottom interior of the hopper, used in combination with an upwardly angled unload conveyor belt elevator at the rear of the hopper. This double conveyor belt unload system is normally used to unload the nuts from the hopper of the harvest trailer into the hopper of a second usually larger harvest trailer. The third type of harvest trailer unload structure uses a hinged tailgate and a tiltable hopper to allow dumping the crop from the hopper in a method similar to that of a dump truck.
Although the harvest trailer of this disclosure is illustrated and described as the type of trailer having the double conveyor belt unload system, the invention of this disclosure may be used with virtually any type of hopper unload structure.